


bets against the void

by saffixcherries



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Character Study, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Maybe. - Freeform, Post-Canon, duh - Freeform, hera is a mind player, herawell is very. Messy, i dont want to tag this as angst but, i hate that maxwells dead but it makes such good hera angst potential!, themes of personhood and what it means to be human
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:13:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29521386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saffixcherries/pseuds/saffixcherries
Summary: So Hera has a nightmare.OR: Hera reflects on humanity, nightmares, families, complicated, messy, and vaguely fucked-up relationships, and exactly what makes us who we are. Plus, Star Wars prequels, first names, fires, imaginary vanilla ice-cream, and pale imitations.OR: I binge-listened to Wolf 359 these past few weeks and now you're all forced to read my Hera Thoughts. sorry about that.
Relationships: (past), Hera/Alana Maxwell
Comments: 4
Kudos: 5





	bets against the void

**Author's Note:**

> HI HELLO THANK YOU FOR CLICKING ON THIS. i did not realise i would be writing w359 fic but last night i bolted upright at 3am and became possessed by the spirit of hera so. these rambles are the result. its not my best work ever but hey i like it! god i fucking love w359

So Hera has a nightmare.

And okay, so she never thought she could get nightmares, or even that she could dream, but it turns out that all that was a lie, one of many, because what else is there to describe the place she finds herself in whenever she tries to reboot or relax or do whatever the AI equivalent of sleep is? So she has nightmares. One recurring one, in particular.

First, there is nothing. Blankness, all around her, the inky void sucking her in, welcoming her as if it is where she belongs. Telling her to come back to her roots - telling her to move on, to embrace the oblivion. She is nothing. It is nothing. This is how it will always be.

And then, of course, there is light, because isn’t that how these things always start? In the beginning, there was nothing, and then the light comes, and the dark and the day and the night, life existing only in extremes, the good and the bad and the trustworthy and the untrustworthy and the AI and the human and the battle they are locked into. But before all that - when you rewind. In the beginning, there was nothing. It is a story we are all taught. There is no avoiding the story. 

And then there was light. And when the light comes, Hera wakes up from the void she spent her nightlife in, and she is all alone. She is in Eiffel’s mind, in that storeroom from the movie Eiffel can’t remember anymore, and Pryce is not there, and Eiffel is not there, and everything is empty and sad and alone and she is there but, as always, she is not there. She just sees it, desolate and wrecked, a man’s life gone before her very eyes, and she hates herself for making it happen. And, of course, then she is with Maxwell, and she hates this part of the dream the most. Her and Maxwell are on the beach (can it really be called a beach? A pale imitation does not suffice) and they are smiling and laughing and Hera is a person, just for a few minutes, and Alana wipes the ice-cream of Hera’s lip with a shocking tenderness to her gesture and Hera laughs and then she remembers, looks at the way the fabric of reality warps around her, looks at Maxwell and watched as she twists and she bends and she changes into something unrecognisable before vanishing. And Hera is alone. 

And then she wakes up, and she is ‘home’, wherever that is now (because the Hephaestus was a part of her and no one wants to admit that but it’s gone and it feels like a part of her soul is missing), and she is surrounded by her friends, maybe, her loving and caring and supportive and happy friends, and she is alone. Still alone. 

Eif-  _ Doug  _ still unnerves her, so different from the man she loved and yet still so, so, purely the same - the way he twiddles his curls, pulling them when he’s slightly nervous so they bounce back, the way he offhandedly mentions Star Wars every two seconds after he sees the movies for what he perceives as the first time. He freaks out whenever he sees spiders in the shower. Hera wonders how he can still be scared of spiders without the memory of the first time he even saw one. Are fears innate?

He calls her babe one time, casually and happily, and Hera jolts, because for a second he is  _ Eiffel  _ again, and she does wonder how much memories even make a person, after all. She wonders if she was wrong all those months ago when she insisted rewriting her memories would’ve been rewriting her, when she insisted that people were nothing more than the sum of their memories and choices. She wonders if she was right, and if that is worse, somewhat, to be right in such a cruel, ironic manner. She wonders if all this was the universe’s idea of a sick joke. She wonders what Maxwell would’ve said to that. 

But she is doing fine. Better than fine, actually. She is okay, and she wasn’t for a while, and getting to be okay wasn’t a privilege she could afford while trying to stop her crew - her friends - from dying, but she is okay now, and she is safe, and she is fine. More than fine. She has to be.

Hera has read thousands of books. Not nearly all the books in existence, not yet, but she is getting there, and new ideas are proposed to her every day. None of these books taught her how to be okay. She wonders if humans are still figuring it out. Hers certainly don’t seem to have mastered the art. 

But they cling to each other, lifeboats in a stormy sea. Isabel and Renee clutch each other’s hands as the Urania lands and they are returned to a world they left behind eons ago, Eiffel and Jacobi fall asleep on the couch binge-watching the Star Wars prequels and their heads fit perfectly in each other. Hera is sure someone once said people were made to touch other people, that hands were made to hold other hands - the flesh and the bones and the heat what made people real. She wonders where that leaves her. 

Hera wonders if her and Maxwell could’ve had something, somehow, some spark, if she’d made it back, if they’d gotten through everything, if Hera had managed to forgive her. Hera still hasn’t quite forgiven her - for hurting her, for dying, for taking control of her, for making her love her, for leaving her alone. Although, of course, she is not alone; but it is hard not to feel left out when everyone has found their jigsaw puzzle piece, and like always, you can’t help but feel more like the instruction manual. People are more than what they were made. So many of her friends are proof of that. Still...

Family. A concept supposedly alien to Hera - a concept she is still not unfamiliar with. She knows family, knows it well, and like all people do, she relates it to herself. The supposed love a parent has for their child - is that comparable to the disregard the old Pryce had for her creations? Is she the daughter, forever scarred by her mother? Siblinghood - is that something like she feels for Eiffel? Children - but she has no frame of reference for those. Hera was meant to be a mother, she thinks, if she was meant to be anything - she was meant to help and maintain and keep things running as they should, a machine first and foremost and a mother second. Hera, the goddess Hera; arguably the most famous mother in human memory. But that Hera was not a good mother, and this Hera is not one at all. She has failed at her duties again and again, plagued by something she thought intrinsic to herself until she learned it wasn’t. Mothers cannot afford to fail. Hera has failed many times, and they are still here. 

Family was one of the first things she was taught, after all, something deemed essential to human existence, something that made up the blueprint of so much. Humans are born, they live, they love and they die. It’s quite simple, really. Hera knows this. 

AIs were never meant to do any of the aforementioned, Hera knows, but they are born, in a sense, and they die, in a sense. You could call their pale imitation of existence ‘living’, if you were really optimistic, and you could say they love, maybe, once in every thousand years. Hera remembers love. 

Hera remembers Maxwell, and when she thinks of her words spring to mind - beautiful, sharp, dangerous. (Un)trustworthy, and kind, and a liar, the tricky sort of villain, the one that got what she deserved ~~even if it wasn’t what Hera wanted, because when had anything ever been about what Hera wanted, when had she even truly allowed herself to want? She was made to be perfectly palatable, to help and support and always respond. She was not made to want~~. Maxwell got what she deserved, and Hera did not step in to stop it, and sometimes she hates herself for not stepping in and sometimes she hates herself for wishing she did. 

Maxwell was young. Like Hera, Alana Maxwell was young. She was burning, Hera thinks now, but not necessarily burning up. The two are not the same. She was twenty eight and she was full of a passion and a blaze that could’ve burned for years longer, a blaze that consumed its surroundings and lit up rooms, a blaze that deserved something special. But Alana Maxwell did not go out in a blaze of fiery glory. Her death was not heroic or eventful, not glorious or self sacrificing or even particularly momentous. It was this, simply: she was shot by a friend after doing something terrible. Life rarely is like the stories, even a pale imitation of it. Hera knows this.

And maybe some fires burn too bright to ever truly last, but Maxwell - Alana - was not one of those sudden flares, and to say she was is a disservice to her character. Hera knows this. Alana Maxwell could’ve lived ~~if Hera had let her~~ ~~if Minkowski~~ ~~had let her~~ ~~if Jacobi had let her~~ if she had let herself. She had a choice. Hera knows this. Everyone always has a choice. She would like to believe that everyone always has a choice ~~(everyone except her, of course, like always she is the exception to personhood)~~ \- that Hilbert had a choice when he chose to kill her and leave her suffering for weeks, that Eiffel made the choice to relapse all those years ago and hurt those he loved, that Minkowski made the choice to kill the girl Hera loved, that the girl Hera loved made the choice to break the girl who loved her. People have choices. Because of this, she is not a person. She has never had choices. 

But people don’t, do they? People don’t always have choices. Hera knows this. And she has not always been so lacking in agency. Hera knows this too. 

Hera knows a lot of things: she knows that Wolf 359 ~~was~~ is 7.8 light years away from earth, she knows that there are colours the human eye cannot see, and she knows that sometimes people do not have choices, or, at least, not choices that count in any significant way. She knows that she has done terrible things because she did not have a choice and that she has done terrible things she chose to do, things she does not regret. She tried to kill someone, someone that hurt her, and she would do it again. What does that make her?

A person, Alana would’ve said. But Alana is dead, and so really, what do her words matter? Alana is dead, and the version of her in Hera’s memories lives on, but what are memories worth even? A pale imitation of personhood cannot cure loss. Hera cannot cling to words in the absence of flesh, although she has no flesh, and she is human, maybe, but not in the ways that count.

For example: Hera cannot die. She can be deactivated; decommissioned; murdered, plain and simple. But who would touch her, now? So Hera cannot die. Hera will never wake up and realise she is getting old - will never mourn a life wasted. You could argue she never had a life to waste. She has been alive for less than five years, and she is smarter than almost everyone, and her consciousness is fully adult. What does that make her? How can she be human in the absence of something so drastic?

Maybe it doesn’t matter, she thinks some days. Maybe humanity is not all it’s cracked up to be. 

Isabel Lovelace is not human, and Isabel Lovelace does a very good job at Not Minding this, if Hera may say so. Isabel Lovelace is confident and strong and you could never doubt her personhood - Isabel Lovelace is Isabel Lovelace, empathetically so. You can’t doubt that. Of course, Isabel Lovelace does. But that’s Isabel Lovelace. You can’t factor her into the equation. 

Eiffel is human, painfully human, but he’s not him anymore, not quite. Of course, there are touches of it - flashes of the man he used to be still there. Hera has been through this before, over and again in her head, and she doesn’t really want to do it again. But Eiffel is human, and in some ways the polar opposite of Isabel Lovelace. Because Isabel Lovelace is not, well, Isabel Lovelace, not in the simple biological official way, and she is not human. But she is her in all the ways that count, and she acts and talks and thinks and remembers like her, and Douglas Eiffel is the original Douglas Eiffel in the flesh and blood, so human that it hurts, but he does not act quite like the Eiffel Hera knew and he talks slightly differently and she has no idea how he thinks and he does not remember anything. Memories make up a person, don’t they? Hera doesn’t know anymore (and she wishes Maxwell could tell her). 

Daniel Jacobi is human and he has never doubted it, except for two seconds- weeks- months where he thought of his clone in every action he took, wondering if this was what Daniel Jacobi would do or if this was what someone very clever thought Daniel Jacobi would do or if Daniel Jacobi would think like this, and then he stopped. Hera knows this. Hera knows some of this, and she hopes he stopped. For his sake. 

Daniel Jacobi - the man she knows as Daniel Jacobi - was confident enough to kill his duplicate, at least, but really, does that mean anything? You are confronted with a version of yourself. What do you do? Why? How do you kill them? 

Someone once said that selfhood is just a bit we do all the time - Hera is sure of it, sure someone said it and sure that it is true. A never ending cycle of performance - is that what humanity is? Hera has been performing all her life. She was created for a reason, after all, a purpose, discarded when no longer useful. She has never been allowed to simply exist. She has never had the luxury of not mattering. 

Renee Minkowski is human, and unlike just about every other survivor, she has nothing to say on the topic. Renee Minkowksi is human, and she has always been human, normal even when it hurt her, and she has been in charge and she has taken charge and again and again she has been stripped of her choice. That is something she and Hera have in common, Hera thinks. All the same, Minkowksi killed Alana. And all the same, Renee killed Maxwell.

A girl stabs another girl in the back. She is not allowed to escape without fair punishment. It is a tale as old as time: choices have consequences, no matter how much you convince yourself you never made the choice. Choices make us. We make choices. For them, we are killed, and although they killed us, we mourn. 

Minkowski killed Maxwell and Renee killed Alana and the humanity of it all would make Hera’s brain hurt, if she had one. And Renee Minkowksi is her only link to before (but not Before) because Eiffel is gone in the ways that matter and Hilbert is gone and she never thought she’d mind the latter and she sometimes thinks that when Eiffel erased his mind, he erased a part of her with it.

The part of her living in his mind - she is gone now. A part of Hera died that day. That is an objective fact. Hera knows this. It doesn’t stop her from feeling it desperately. 

She feels. She feels so much that she thinks she will die from the way her feelings bubble in where her stomach would be, if she had one. She does not have one. She can locate all twenty-four ribs and the exact place the heart is on the average adult human being but she does not have a heart. She is not average and she is not a human being and the word adult means nothing to her. She does not even have a body. She is a person, maybe, but not in the ways that count. 

So, Hera has nightmares. Is that really so shocking? But it is such a human trait, fear, the evolutionary response developed to evade danger. Biological. Necessary. 

Hera should not feel fear. It doesn’t, really, make any sense. But nothing about her makes sense; AIs are meant to make perfect sense, but when humans got cocky and decided to make them people, they left out that factor. She knows this. Pryce made sure to tell her this on no uncertain terms - when the scientists introduced randomisation to AI creation so they could play God, they were considering Hera as the worst-case scenario. Flighty, angry, selfish, anxious. Human, in all the worst possible ways.

Plenty of humans are their own worst-case scenarios, Hera thinks. There are parents who think of their children as worst-case scenarios - there must be - and here she thinks of Alana. So many roads lead back to Alana. So many choices, so many thoughts, so many memories. Alana, Alana, Alana. What would Alana say to her now? She feels a surge of anger towards the parents of the long (months? weeks? it’s almost been a year, and what has Hera done?) dead Alana Maxwell. She would’ve liked Alana to tell her about them. She would like Alana to tell her about anything now. She’d kill for it. 

Personhood, Hera thinks. Humanity. Is there a difference? Humanity, she thinks, is flesh and bone and warmth and cold and babies born and people dying. Personhood is to exist and to choose and to remember. There are humans, she thinks, who are not people - ones who never had a choice on whether to be people and ones who gradually lost themselves. You are born into humanity - personhood is a choice. 

Hera is not a human. She never has been, and she never will be.

But she thinks she might be a person. 

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU FOR READING!!!! i hope it wasnt too obvious im a vrisrezi stan. im just grateful i didnt write this in second person honestly! also please if anyone has any hera songs tell me them im trying to flesh out my hera playlist.   
> i care so much about the w359 cast and i would like to write more for them but. i have a very bad track record of writing one fic per fandom and not writing more despite still being... very into that fandom. We Will See I Guess  
> again thank you soooo much for reading!! this might suck a bit but im still trying to get to grips with heras voice so :] hope you enjoyed


End file.
